Overview

In our first three years, we have developed hugely impactful and cost-effective models for tackling 2 critical issues:

1. Children living permanently on the streets in Sierra Leone(our ‘Street Child’ programme)
2. Communities totally lacking the most rudimentary of educational facilities (our ‘Every Child in School’ programme)

Where We Work

Vision

Our goals are not small at all. Having spent three years pioneering two enormously impactful strategies we are focused on rolling them out to the greatest possible extent.

• ECiS – government statistics suggest that at least 300,000 children do not attend school in Sierra Leone. The vast majority of these are in impoverished, outlying rural areas. We believe our simple ‘software-focused’ strategy of investing minimally in (expensive) infrastructure but substantially in (comparatively inexpensive) teacher-training, material provision and community advocacy could, scaled-up, make a significant dent in this figure. Specifically we have committed to ensuring that remote, destitute Tambakha Chiefdom, where we have established these first 12 simple schools, achieves Millennium Development Goal 2 (‘universal primary education by 2015’) – which alone will require a trebling, and significant investment in the consolidation of, our efforts there to date.
• Street Children – we have spent the past 100 days, in partnership with Government and an international consultancy trying to establish ‘base-line’ figures on the problem nationally. This has never been done before. Our ambition is to substantially impact the number of children living on the street. We work to reunite children who are living on the streets with their families or in exceptional cases, with foster families. These children follow our 3 phase programme to reinstate their human rights, to reintroduce them into the family, school and sustainable living.

1. Emergency phase: Receive food, medical care, clothing and counselling in our day care centre.
2. Education. Once we have reunited a child with their family we fund their education.
3.  Sustainability. Empower each family with the business skills and capital to fund their entire family and live without our help

Impact

Our ‘Street Child’ programme has successfully reunited over 1000 ‘permanent street children’ with families, placed them into school and has (or is) working with the families on mediation and income-generation support to ensure sustainability.

• As an indicator of sustainability - of the children we reunited with families in 2009 and who received their final support of any nature from the charity in summer 2010, 74% passed their end of year school exam or equivalent in June 2011, and 87% were confirmed to still be attending school in November 2011)

Our ‘Every Child in School’ programme has established 12 rudimentary primary schools in remote, rural communities which have simply never had schools worthy of the name. It also supplies materials to the 2000+ children who attend the schools. It also is training 160 community people to reach the official basic government teaching qualification – 160 teachers whose growing skills will benefit 6000-8000 children in the current academic year.